Well, considering most of the team is working only a few hours every week, we are not too behind schedule, but I don't foresee we can release a demo for november. Some time has been spent trying to find a workflow that help an small and unexperienced team to produce a sizeable amount of complex assets. We are still experimenting, but a few things are already in place.
Ok, lets see what have we done.
After several tests, we have defined player models structure. We are using a body separated in six parts: head, torso, arms, hands, legs and feet. To save time, the character is generated via MakeHuman. The pro is that you get a complete and anatomically correct model in minutes. The cons, you have to work a bit to lower the poly count, because MakeHuman offers a high poly model and a very low poly one that looks ugly. Also, all the models looks pretty much the same (you will notice that in the character creation scene), but as we use an isometric camera, during gameplay the racial differences are almost imperceptible. My advice: don't do that if your artist have enough time to sculpt and retopologize, or can go directly to modeling.
The characters are nothing without items, and we found a 3d artists that produced several of them. Now we have more than 30 weapons. The armors required more tests, until I could convince the team that the correct workflow involves producing equipment pieces that can replace body parts (which requires the same skeleton as the base body) or can be simply put on top of the body. For each race/sex an additional step was required: shape keys. Shape keys provide different shapes for a single model, instead of having one model for each race/sex. Looks difficult? Well, not that much. Needs effort and polishing, but, what in game development doesn´t needs it?
Currently we are generating body variations to create a variety of NPCs from a single base model. It is an old method, used by CD Projekt RED in The Witcher 2/3.
The combat system works, but it will be put to test with some volunteers soon. All the systems required are mostly there: weapons do damage, armors block it, combat related skills affect it, or decide in dodge rolls, same as attributes. We have spells/abilities, and even some NPCs can use their unique abilities, like corpse eaters who can cast Fetid Spit on you.
Quest system has suffered our lack of programmers. So, tw developers have worked on it, each one proposing his own solution, and leaving it incomplete. Im working on it right now. The dialog system works, but it is a huge monster that nobody but me underestands, and it is under continue work.
One of the things I needed since the beginning was a save system. Took some days to have one and now you can save and load the game. It is still far from finished, but helps to save time when testing quests, combat, etc.
I knew that the UI would be a problem. Somebody volunteered to do the UX design, but after a couple of proposals (one of them I had to modify it a lot) didn't produced anything more. Now I have found very close to me a friend that accepted to work on that, and also provide the graphics, not only the UX. Work should be delivered soon... or at least, I expect so.
I will prepare another video soon, showing the scene in a more complete state. We lack proper terrain support, that is hurting the scene and makes it look unfinished and plain, but I decided to wait for Godot's own terrain system. After trying third party addons, I considered that it wasnt worth the effort of adding two addons (one for terrain, other for scatter), each one with bugs/problems, just to remove them later. Check the video in previous post if ou havent, and see in the description how to support us.
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